The overall aim of our research was to produce an ethnography of ballet as a social
practice. We draw upon our fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London) where we conducted
20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff, and observed ‘the company at
work’, in class, rehearsal, and performance. We explored
dancers’ (n = 9) and ex-dancers’ (who are now
administrators, teachers, and character dancers: n = 11) perceptions of
their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that have occurred in the world
of ballet over their professional lives. In this article, we draw upon Pierre
Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, physical capital and cultural capital. The
main focus of our article is an extended discussion of our threefold distinction
between individual habitus, institutional habitus and choreographic habitus.
Although our ethnography of the body is set within the elite cultural field of
professional classical ballet, we hope that our research adds to debates on the
interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and society, and
on the salience of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus for understandings of the
social world.
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